Productivity has a simple and unambiguous economics definition: "dollars in" / "hours worked". Software engineering is high-productivity simply because of the

Productivity has a simple and unambiguous economics definition: "dollars in" / "hours worked". Software engineering is high-productivity simply because of the ability to resell the same piece of software over and over again, letting one engineer generate dollars in far in excess of the amount they actually work on it. Childcare is low productivity because people pay a certain (customarily low) amount for it, and the dollars in will simply be some small multiple of the price. The sharp inflation in childcare costs today is the market's way of properly attributing productivity back up the labor chain. If people still need childcare, they will pay more for it, forgoing other goods to get it. That raises the dollars in, which makes the productivity numbers for childcare equilibrate to how much society actually values it.